Demos Quarterly Issue 9/1996 Demos Quarterly is published by Demos 9 Bridewell Place London EC4V 6AP Telephone: 0171 353 4479 Facsimile: 0171 353 4481 © Demos 1996 All rights reserved Editorial team: Rowena Young Helen Wilkinson Perri 6 Geoff Mulgan Tristram Hunt Debbie Porter Rachel Jupp Joanna Wade Tom Bentley Nick Banner Mark Leonard Rachel McGough Open access. Some rights reserved. As the publisher of this work, Demos has an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content electronically without charge. We want to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible without affecting the ownership of the copyright, which remains with the copyright holder. Users are welcome to download, save, perform or distribute this work electronically or in any other format, including in foreign language translation without written permission subject to the conditions set out in the Demos open access licence which you can read here. Please read and consider the full licence. 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The Demos circulation licence is adapted from the ‘attribution/no derivatives/non-commercial’ version of the Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons licences go to www.creativecommons.org Contents RUNNING THE LOCAL The local’s coming home: decentralisation by degrees 1 Geoff Mulgan and Perri 6 It takes more than a village 19 Tristram Hunt The incredible shrinking state 29 Tom Nairn No sense of place? Changing patterns of local identity 35 Brian Gosschalk and Warren Hatter Knowing me, knowing you: revitalising local 47 representative democracy Gerry Stoker Ending the cold war: a treaty with government 52 Gerry Stoker CITY LIFE The convivial city 55 Liz Greenhalgh and Ken Worpole Two tales of two cities 65 Ian Taylor Demos 9/1996 The making of Curitiba 72 Tristram Hunt Cities of people and cities of bits 77 Peter Hall REGENERATION Green shoots 83 Ravi Gurumurthy A green light for local power 91 Ian Christie Syndicated taxes: a new policy for regenerating 101 city centres Tony Travers and Jeroen Weimar The secrets of local success 109 Paul S Williams Creating social capital 117 Alan Whitehead and Judith Smyth TROUBLES New kids on the block 125 Helen Wilkinson Catch them while they’re young 135 Jon Bright Someone to watch over you 141 Ian Taylor PROVISIONS Learning beyond the classroom 145 Tom Bentley iv Demos Contents First aid for local health needs 153 David Colin-Thomé REGULARS Book marks 159 Media watch 165 Projects update 169 Practicals 171 Demos staff 173 Facts 177 Signs of the times 181 Demos v The return of the local Geoff Mulgan and Perri 6 signal the local’s homecoming with a proposal for Decentralisation by degrees Tom Nairn on the Incredible shrinking state: could Andorra and Liechtenstein be the state of things to come? Liz Greenhalgh and Ken Worpole on The convivial city. Most people feel uneasy about the cities in which they live. What can be done to make them more habitable? Peter Hall looks at Cities of people and cities of bits and shows why, even in an age of information technology, cities haven’t lost their edge Tony Travers and Jeroen Weimar bid for Syndicated taxes and a new policy to regenerate city centres Ian Christie throws A green light on local power and argues that environmental policy is now going local vi Demos The local’s coming home: decentralisation by degrees Geoff Mulgan* and Perri 6† Everyone says they want to decentralise power, but how can it be done when there are such variations of competence and legitimacy? The changing politics of localism ‘Local’ is an adjective that divides. For some, it is a term of unqualified approbation – ‘local people’,‘local services’,‘local community’.For others, it signifies pettiness – ‘parish pump politics’ – introversion – ‘purely local concerns’ – or particularism and incompetence – ‘aldermanly amateurism’.1 Just now it matters a lot which view you take. Since the mid-1970s, local government in Britain has been on a roller coaster. Its revenue spending has increased, and it has acquired new responsibilities in com- munity care and environmental protection. However, swingeing cuts in capital finance, especially for housing in the early 1980s have never been restored, both revenue and capital financing have been subject to more detailed central control, and more detailed specification than ever before *Director at Demos. †Research Director at Demos. Demos 1 Demos 9/1996 has precipitated from Westminster and Whitehall about how local gov- ernment should provide services. Many in local government still hope the political pendulum will swing back to an era of local discretion, atleast in how they might go about their tasks, and perhaps over the resources they can raise locally to do so. But just how much power should be devolved to local govern- ment, or to more specialised local agencies? How much should local government control its own revenues? Is the public really any more committed to the town hall than Whitehall? The public’s desire to be involved in decisions varied almost as much as local council capacities to take them. That is why this essay therefore takes a different tack to the usual run of blueprints. It argues that what local government needs is a new set of mechanisms for evolv- ing new powers and legitimacy, rather than a single new settlement for every authority in the land. And it argues for a very different approach to the familiar cliches of subsidiarity, one which distinguishes between different services according to their role in shaping social cohesion. The global interest in local power Behind today’s debates in Britain is a worldwide interest in decentrali- sation. Big government has lost its lustre. Distant institutions are felt to be less trusted than ones close at hand. Here, as elsewhere, people want clearly demarcated neighbourhoods, community, and a sense that power is responsive. The rise of communitarianism is one symptom of this, as are the assertion of states’rights in the USA, the free communes movement in the Nordic countries, the creation of more powerful regional authorities in France, and the renaissance of local government in east central Europe after the fall of communism. ln much of the world, there is evidence that people want power and a sense of belong- ing brought right down to the level of the neighbourhood. In the UK, attitudes to the local rarely fit into fixed political positions. Some on Labour’s left hark back to Livingstone’s GLC and Blunkett’s Sheffield.On the Thatcherite right,there are still neo-Ridleyite Tories who dream of the gradual abolition of local government and its replacement 2 Demos The local’s coming home: decentralisation by degrees with contracted local administration. But between them, both Heseltine and Blair favour elected mayors to regalvanise local leadership, and commentators ranging from Conservatives like Simon Jenkins to social democrats like David Marquand argue for the return of power to local government. To complicate matters further, the Labour Party may be rediscovering the virtues of central control, just as some on the Con- servative Right, such as John Redwood, are abandoning Ridley’s vision, scarred by the lesson that centralism means centralisation of blame and perhaps anticipating a period when Conservative-run local gov- ernment will face a national Labour government. Many in local government hope for a new and stable ‘settlement’,of almost constitutional status, in which local authorities will secure both greater autonomy and the status of local government as opposed to administration.We believe this is misguided. The era of stable ‘settlements’ such as the Butskellite welfare state consensus is over. The future tasks and shape of the state will be in continuous flux. Second, there are limits to the local autonomy that is feasible or desirable. Third, myths of ‘self-government’ are as danger- ous at the local level as they are at the level of the nation state. In a time of growing transnational interdependence and external constraint upon governance systems, claims of autonomy and governing power are not absolutes, but make sense only in complex and evershifting structures of interlocking power, competence and legitimacy. Therefore, the important task for policy-makers who can take a long view is not so much to develop blueprints for a grand settlement, based on empirically fleshing out such theological ideas as ‘subsidiar- ity’, but rather to start from where we are and describe desirable and achievable strategies for long term change. That starting point is a highly centralised system. Centralisation has long been a tradition in British public management.Although the case for a substantial devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and (at least) the North East is overwhelming, much of the centralisation neither can, nor should, be reversed too quickly.